


The X-Files Season 11

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [42]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s11e01 My Struggle III, F/M, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 18:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14026179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: This is a compilation of episode reviews I did for Season 11 of The X-Files, the second "special event series" that ran in the winter of 2018. These reviews were all posted originally on tumblr. Overall I enjoyed the series, though there were the predictable problems with Chris Carter's writing and plotting. Enjoy.





	1. This Is Insanity: My Struggle III

  * After posting a bit about the Big Reveal at the end of “My Struggle III,” I felt sort of obligated to watch the episode. I mean, I thought, maybe the plot summary makes this episode sound worse than it is. Maybe this is really a flawed yet enjoyable hour of television that happens to be loused up in the final 2 minutes by a really asinine decision made by Chris Carter; and really, have I not seen enough asinine decisions from him to be more or less inured to them? Plus I hear Mulder and Scully have some good screen time together in this one.

So I watched it.

I really thought, after “Babylon” and “My Struggle I & II,” that I had run out of scorn where Chris Carter is concerned. But damned if this episode didn’t inspire me to dig deep and get a little more. This is bad television. Setting aside the implications of the much-discussed Final Revelation, Chris Carter’s writing itself is just so technically incompetent that it fills me with rage. 

The cold open is a bad sign: a montage of stock footage of historical events overlaid with paranoid music and a turgid, pretentious voice-over monotonously delivered by William B. Davis. This is one of the least challenging and least interesting ways that Carter could have set the scene for this episode; and whether it’s lack of effort or lack of competence, the same laziness afflicts the entire script. There is, for instance, far too much time spent on Mulder driving, much of it made worse by more of those turgid voice-overs. Also…Mulder has Jeffrey Spender in his contacts? Spender is still showing up on caller ID under his real name? Also he is 80% less disfigured than the last time we saw him? Why?

Almost none of the dialogue is good. With Mulder and Scully things are at least sometimes interesting because Anderson and Duchovny are both pros at spinning gold out of Chris Carter’s crap dialogue. But my God, the scenes with Cancer Man and Monica at his house…that writing is so bad it cannot be redeemed. Faithful readers of my [X-Files Rewatch](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fseries%2F95798&t=YjNjZmRjOGUzMDZiZWU2YjA2MzdlYjczYTAwNDFhMzZjODBkZDMzZixqcEVPeUJLOA%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=http%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F169451647709%2Fthis-is-insanity-my-struggle-iii-miraculously&m=1) will know that I was never a big fan of either Monica Reyes or Annabeth Gish. Nevertheless, I am angry on Gish’s behalf about the absolutely shitty quality of the dialogue written for her, which sounds like it was generated by Siri. In fact, you could replace Reyes in those scenes with an Amazon Echo and they would be virtually unchanged. “It sounds like you’re trying to end human life on this planet. How can I help?” Carter doesn’t care at all about the fact that Cancer Man is speaking, specifically, to Monica Reyes; he could just as easily be talking to Diana Fowley or Alex Krychek or, as I said, Alexa. Nothing Reyes says or does in this episode is character-driven or even character-specific, and as a result all of those scenes, instead of being Menacing and Tension-filled, are just tedious and boring. And I’m sorry, but this is Writing 101, this is beginner shit that Carter is just apparently either too incompetent or too lazy to get right. Any self-respecting amateur would have put more effort into making Monica’s side of those conversations more meaningful and more revealing of her character.

 And there are mistakes like that everywhere. Mulder’s confrontation with the surviving conspirator and Diana Fowley 2.0, for instance, is also badly written, with some really exceptional clunkers, such as Diana Fowley 2.0′s description of their space colonization plan. Scully’s brain flashing in Morse Code is an appallingly stupid idea to start with, and the conversation Mulder and Skinner have around it does nothing to elevate it. The only points at which this episode ever comes alive are the moments of tenderness between Mulder and Scully and the moments of physical conflict–Mulder dispatching Scully’s attacker, Skinner and Reyes fighting over the gun in Cancer Man’s car. And all of that is down to the actors, director, and production team. 

“I’m not an irrational person,” Scully says, early on. Yeah, she’s not supposed to be; but by God she is in this episode, and that too is offensive to me. But of course nothing about this episode’s treatment of Scully can possibly be MORE offensive than the final retconning of “En Ami.” 

First of all, it offends me that “En Ami” even exists. William B. Davis (the actor who plays Cancer Man) wrote it, and even after the rest of the team went to work on his script it still plays like a really awful self-insert fanfic written for the sole purpose of allowing the author surrogate to make it with one of the canon characters. Scully is uncharacteristically gullible throughout, and–as “My Struggle III” so nauseatingly reminds us–she is also drugged and thrown in the back of Cancer Man’s car, after which she wakes up in his house in silk pajamas. None of us at the time were thinking, “Oh my GOD, he’s impregnated her WITH SCIENCE!” Most of us just didn’t want to think about what happened in that interval because the prospect of Cancer Man violating an unconscious Scully was just so awful to us. But like many other bad episodes, “En Ami” was always something you could just write off as a one-time mistake. “My Struggle III” now comes along to shove the thing down our throats by making it the cornerstone of the paternity narrative. Even if this turns out to be one of Cancer Man’s many lies, we’ve STILL been forced to revisit that fucking thing and to imagine an unconscious Scully being medically raped by the show’s most repellent character. 

And we’re all so upset by THAT that we don’t even complain about the biggest writing fail of them all, which is the fact that Carter “resolves” “My Struggle II” by going full  _Dallas_  on us. This is the cop-out to end all cop-outs. First of all, it doesn’t even work; why would Scully be having 15 minutes’ worth of “visions” of fucking Tad O’Malley and his terrible right-wing show? Second…this is the absolute MINIMUM of effort you could put into resolving a cliff-hanger. And after what I have been through with Moffat and  _Sherlock_  and the extended-mind-palace theory, I’ve just had it with people who just hit “reset” because getting themselves out of the corners they’ve written themselves into is just too much work.

“We do our work,” says Scully, at the end of “My Struggle III.” Precisely, Chris…DO YOUR WORK! You have work to do as the showrunner and as one of the lead writers and YOU ARE NOT DOING IT. God, you could hire an intern that would write better scripts than this. And maybe you should. The intern probably would treat Scully better, not to mention Reyes. It just makes me so angry. Men like Chris Carter are this lazy because they can afford to be. No woman trying to make it as a writer or producer in this industry could be that lazy and survive. And yet. Here we are. THREE installments of “My Struggle,” all of them awful.

I look forward to tuning in for the episodes he didn’t write. I regret having wasted an hour on this one.





	2. What World Are You Living In?: S11 e02, "This"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All this is to say that The X-Files, under Chris Carter’s direction, has had a hard time dragging itself into the twenty-first century. Carter, on the one hand, keeps refusing to allow the show to end; on the other, he doesn’t really seem to want it to change. But with “This,” Glen Morgan finally brought this show back to life. I don’t think the show has a long-term future, with or without Gillian Anderson; but at least it has successfully entered the present. And it turns out to be a rough ride; but that’s what makes it feel alive.

When I finally got around to watching the 2008 X-Files film  _I Want to Believe,_ I was struck among other things by how moribund it was. Despite all the horror, the film just felt dead to me. Mulder and Scully seemed to be stagnating, trapped in an unsatisfying twilight existence which they could neither embrace nor escape. But the world around them was dying too, as the leaves fell and crumbled around them; and finally the whole thing played out on a landscape that was literally frozen. IWTB felt less like a rebirth than like an extension of the show’s already painful and protracted decline. The last “special event series” had a little more kick to it–some of the time. But, like IWTB, it was weighed down by malaise and melancholy–Mulder’s depression, his estrangement from Scully, the incoherent new apocalyptic mythology and its irritating new prophet Tad O’Malley, and the ghost of William haunting everything. The high point of that series was Darin Morgan’s “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster”–because even though it too was in the grip of a midlife existential crisis, at least it was funny, and Mulder and Scully were enjoying themselves.

All this is to say that  _The X-Files_ , under Chris Carter’s direction, has had a hard time dragging itself into the twenty-first century. Carter, on the one hand, keeps refusing to allow the show to end; on the other, he doesn’t really seem to want it to change. But with “This,” Glen Morgan finally brought this show back to life. I don’t think the show has a long-term future, with or without Gillian Anderson; but at least it has successfully entered the present. And it turns out to be a rough ride; but that’s what makes it feel alive.

I’ve done a lot of dumping on “My Struggle III” already, so I’ll try to stay away from the invidious comparisons. But honestly…if you put the cold open of “My Struggle III” up against the cold open of “This,” you will see what I’m talking about. On the one hand, you have a historical montage illustrating the voice-over narration of the show’s oldest and closest-to-death character, dragging us not just back to the 1990s but back to the moon landing. The moon landing happened the year I was born…and I am OLD. It might as well start with “In the beginning, there was the smoking man.” “This” begins with Mulder and Scully asleep together on the couch, surrounded by file folders, with the TV on in the background. It’s partly a joke about how old the two leads are getting–yes, when you are my age, you too will fall asleep without meaning to while trying to work late–but it’s also a sweet moment of intimacy and mutual trust for them, and it recalls the happiest phase of their relationship: those season 7 episodes like “All Things” and “Je Souhaite” when they were finally Doing It, and Scully could just go over to Mulder’s apartment and hang out with him on the couch and watch bad movies and nestle into their little couple cocoon. 

Then the assassins show up, and we are suddenly introduced to Mulder and Scully, Millennium Edition. And everything gets so much better.

Glen Morgan has talked about wanting to get back to the old M&S chemistry that made people fall in love with the show. But what I like about “This” is that they actually have built on that foundation a  _new_ chemistry which testifies to the length and intimacy of their bond. I’ve talked about how, during the original run, Mulder’s “[SCULLLAAAAAY](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/104735400294/sculllaaaaaayy)!” was a perfect little microcosm of their whole relationship: frantic, longing, agitated, with each straining toward the endangered beloved across an ever-yawning abyss. In “This,” the agitated and yearning “SCULLAAAAY!” is replaced by Mulder’s urgent but unruffled “Go!” Instead of struggling desperately to find each other, they spring simultaneously into coordinated but independent action, blocking the shooters’ paths and forcing them to split up. It’s cool to watch, of course; but it’s also showing us how confident they are in their communication and how easily this spontaneous cooperation comes to them, even under the most disorienting of circumstances. And that is what saves their lives, over and over again: their unspoken communication, the mutual trust that enables their synchronized movements. As fantastic as the actual events of the episode are, the way they face them together makes you believe in them as people in a long-term relationship. From moment to moment they’re constantly having to make decisions about how to deal with the dangers thrown at them; and they’re always on the same wavelength. The decision to fight it out against the Russian and his goons at the house is made silently, and the planning phase is compressed into two lines of dialogue: “Fourteen rounds.” “I’ve got eight.”

Many people who write for television are under this impression that established relationships are boring. They are not. They are exciting; and this is why–this weird consciousness-sharing, this constantly being alive to each other’s thoughts and feelings, the wealth of shared experiences and knowledge that you store up as the years go by. “This” crackles with that kind of energy–in the action sequences, certainly, but also in the scenes like the one at the diner, where Mulder is calming Scully down before she’s finished her first startle reflex. The plot machinery slows things down a bit–more on that in a moment–but the sequence in the Long Lines Building is fantastic. It’s even more fantastic because–at least to my jaded eyes–it appears to be openly skewering some of the hoary X-Files cliches that have hobbled all of the “My Struggle”s. 

The main business of the Long Lines sequence is the revelation that Purlieu Services is part of the Conspiracy that was introduced in “My Struggle III” via some truly awful scenes in which Erica Price, the surviving conspirator, and Cancer Man dole out exposition about their shady plans for space colonization with the maximum amount of pretentious obfuscation. “This” eventually brings us back to the same place, with the obvious intention of getting it right this time. Erica Price even starts off, as she looks out of the shadows at Mulder, by saying straight up that their first “encounter” was “disappointing,” but that after seeing him and Scully run for their lives for a while she can finally understand what all the fuss is about. But she’s not in Chris Carter’s world any more; and it doesn’t work out the way she planned. Because:

1) The world no longer comes to a complete standstill while the conspirator monologues to her heart’s content. There is a fairly long Erica Price voiceover in this scene; but instead of just watching her pontificate, we’re watching Scully come to the rescue. 

2) 1990s Mulder, in “Two Fathers” / “One Son,” accepted a very similar deal to the one Erica Price is offering when it was proposed to him by her predecessor Diana Fowley: most of humanity will die, but he and Scully will be rescued along with the conspirators so they can go on together. The way he plays her during that conversation is so, so satisfying to me. Finally, he’s figured out that just because someone’s saying something to you in hushed tones in a darkened room, that doesn’t mean you should believe it. That’s growth. Growth is good.

3) Millennium Edition Mulder fights dirty! Did you see him kick Russian dude in the balls after he saw Scully’s shadow? 

4) Even split up, Scully and Mulder are still functioning as a team and still coordinating. Somehow.

So, about the premise.

Look, I get that “This” is not really doing anything earth-shattering with the idea of a simulated afterlife. I submit that it isn’t trying to, and that it doesn’t really matter. We hear Morgan’s pre-emptive response to this critique in the Russian commander’s disgusted response to Mulder’s phone wiping itself clean: “Kill switch.” “Kill Switch,” of course, is the title of a much-hyped 1990s X-File written by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson and featuring a computer genius and his Goth girlfriend who wanted to upload their consciousnesses into a shared digital world and leave behind their “inefficient bodies.” (They actually manage to do it, too.) The point is: the X-Files doesn’t have to try to be  _Black Mirror,_ because Black Mirror already is _The X-Files._ The simulation plot isn’t about trying to score points for cutting-edginess; it’s basically about trying to give Langly and the Lone Gunman a decent send-off. The episode of Season 9 in which the Lone Gunmen die is so bad that it is actually and for real titled “Jump the Shark.” To the extent that “This” looks backwards instead of forward, it’s in Morgan’s obvious affection for Langly, which manifests in the soundtrack, the breadcrumbs, and the oddly touching yet also fairly ridiculous Arlington Cemetery scene. I personally am glad that the grainy, pixelated footage of simLangly helped camouflage Dean Haglund’s poor line delivery. 

But perhaps what I most appreciate is the way the show reflects my own experience–as an original fan of the X-Files who is about the same age as Gillian Anderson–of being simply bewildered and overwhelmed by the madness into which the post-1990s world has descended. Morgan takes every opportunity to drag Buttercup and his regime’s assault on law and order in general and the FBI in particular; and he’s clearly made up his mind on the question of Buttercup’s collusion with the Russians. (Where is Krychek? I mean I know he’s dead, but that doesn’t stop Cancer Man!) And though the dialogue can get a little stilted, I do feel for poor Skinner as he stands there and rattles off all the new bullshit he has to deal with now. Because this is the thing: we all remember back when Russia was the Evil Empire and the Republicans just couldn’t hate it enough. Now, the Republicans have sold us out to Putin, and are acting like that’s not a problem. So what did we all go through all that for? This is what the Russian commander is driving at when he’s got Mulder on the ground: would it not have been easier for the US and Russia to just sell out and go into business together right away? All that shit going on in “Tunguska” / “Terma,” all that intrigue with Krychek, all that fear of nuclear Armageddon–can that really all have been completely meaningless? “How did we get here?” Skinner asks, staring at Scully and her gun. How, indeed. That, perhaps, is the greatest X-File of them all. 

So in that sense, Mulder and Scully are all of us. Older, smarter, tougher, harder to fool…and, often, exhausted by the relentless struggle against forces of evil that just never stay defeated and bewildered by the inversions and collapses that have created their new political landscape. But still fighting, and fighting well. It matters to me to have Mulder and Scully with me on this ride through the current catastrophe. The truth has never been harder to find.


	3. I Love My Dead Alien-Human Hybrid Son: S11 e04, "Ghouli"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The whole thrust of the X-File in “Founder’s Mutation,” I argued, is that the reproductive process, even when it is deliberately and egregiously manipulated by human scientists with nefarious goals, is ultimately less important than the child it produces–who deserves to be loved and cherished even if through no fault of its own it is a hideous mutant. 
> 
> “Ghouli” takes all of that to the next level. Below the cut tag, I’m going to talk about why, and I’m thinking I’ll start with Frankenstein.

Chris Carter never cared much about continuity; but James Wong evidently does. Even though “Ghouli” is part of the ‘mythology’ arc of Season 11 and therefore has to conform to the eleventh-hour revelations shoved down our gullets at the end of “My Struggle III,” thematically if not literally “Ghouli” is really a sequel to his Season 10 episode, “[Founder’s Mutation](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/138157647199/the-devils-pitchfork-needling-the-founder).” The most emotionally affecting part of that episode was the glimpses into the parallel fantasies nurtured separately by Scully and Mulder about what it would have been like to raise William. I pointed out at the time that despite the fact that they were supposed to be split up at that point in the Season 10 arc, [each of them based their fantasy William on their memories of the other](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/138182500979/random-thoughts-on-the-fantasy-sequences). Together or not, each of them saw William in his or her own mind as a child they had created and nurtured  _together_. I saw all this, in the context of the rest of the episode, as a rebuke not just to the season 10 “break up arc” but to Chris Carter’s whole treatment of Scully’s pregnancy and the obsession with William’s genetic origins. The whole thrust of the X-File in “Founder’s Mutation,” I argued, is that the reproductive process, even when it is deliberately and egregiously manipulated by human scientists with nefarious goals, is ultimately less important than the child it produces–who deserves to be loved and cherished even if through no fault of its own it is a hideous mutant. 

“Ghouli” takes all of that to the next level. Below the cut tag, I’m going to talk about why, and I’m thinking I’ll start with Frankenstein.

Mulder, in his “Bob” coffeeshop, complains at one point to Scully about the deterioration of the monster in the Internet age. Ghouli is boring; it’s just a compendium of different gross and horrifying monster parts. He compares Ghouli unfavorably to Frankenstein; and even though he’s not calling it the Creature like he should be and even though everything he cites is actually from the movies, I think the novel itself is still being invoked here. Mary Shelley had a terrible time with all of her pregnancies, lost more than one child, and wrote  _Frankenstein_  partly as a way of processing that. It is not accidental that Victor Frankenstein is not only ‘playing God’ but playing mother: he wants to be able to produce offspring all on his own. It is also not accidental that most of the horror in that novel stems from the fact that Victor rejects his first ‘child’ immediately after it comes to life. Somehow, as soon as the monster is animated, Victor has a fit of “WHAT HAVE I DONE?”, decides the Creature is hideous (after having deliberately built him to be beautiful), and flees. Eventually, the abandoned Creature tracks Victor down–now fully mature and with a flawless command of language–and a lot of people die.

Anyway, my point is: Skinner’s conversation with Mulder on the ferry confirms that William is a product of a top-secret alien-human hybrid genetics experiment. Now this means, I’m sorry to say, that evidently Cancer Man was telling the truth about how Scully was impregnated. That sucks. It also means that Mulder is not William’s biological father. That, I suppose, sucks too for a lot of viewers. It doesn’t suck for me. You know why? Because MULDER DOESN’T CARE. And that’s AWESOME.

Right after Skinner tells Mulder that “Jackson” was a Project Crossroads baby, Mulder says that “Jackson” is actually “our son.” He’s heard the story. He knows that this means Scully’s egg was spliced or whatever with alien DNA and not his own sperm. But William is still, to him, THEIR son. Because he and Scully tried to conceive a son together; because they were lovers and partners when they were doing that; because Mulder was there for William’s birth; and because for the year he was on the run, William was part of the family he’d left behind. Instinctively or deliberately, in the moment after he gets the news, he decides to honor his  _experience_  of being William’s father instead of the genetic reality. 

As a nonbiological mother (my daughter was carried by my wife), that is extremely important to me. My daughter and I share no genetic material, and it makes no difference. I mean, medically, I’m just as glad she will not inherit my tendencies to hypertension and insulin resistance. But in no other way does our lack of genetic connection matter either to me or to her at all. Being a mother, or a father, is not just about genes, it is about the love you feel and the work you do. For this reason it is possible to have more than one mother, or more than one father–just as William has two mothers and at least two fathers, one of whom is evidently an alien. And one of the reasons I hate Chris Carter’s treatment of the pregnancy storyline with the fire of a thousand suns is that Carter doesn’t care about or understand *any* portion of parenting that’s not genetic. All through seasons 8, 9, 10, and I’m going to bet 11, Carter just assumed that all anyone would ever care about was who William’s biological father was. Well, joke’s on you, Chris. Not only do the fans not care, Mulder doesn’t care either.

Like Victor Frankenstein’s Creature, William disappears from his parents’ life as an infant and then re-enters it on the verge of adulthood. He’s learned to talk–like the Creature–from someone else. He’s had a lifetime of experiences that Scully and Mulder didn’t share. Like the Creature, he’s hybrid and potentially monstrous; like the Creature, he has superhuman powers and does harm without really intending it, as part of a clumsy and wrongheaded search for love. But after the body bag scene, he has one thing that the Creature never had: the knowledge that his creators loved him. Not his genetic engineer–not whatever alien had to give up his DNA, not Project Crossroads–but his parents: the two human beings who wished him into the world together. 

So, like “Founder’s Mutation,” this is an episode about embracing the strange, the new, and the monstrous–and about recognizing that fatherhood, like motherhood, is as much a matter of the heart and the mind as it is a matter of the gametes. Their journey as William’s parents has been very strange; the Vanderkamps’ journey, I’m sure, was strange too. But William is still *their* son, Chris Carter or no Chris Carter, Cancer Man or no Cancer Man. At least as long as James Wong has anything to say about it.


	4. The Lost Art of Social Commentary: S11 e04, "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I generally like Darin Morgan’s episodes and I certainly hate much of what’s happened to this country in the last 20 years. So why did I not…in the end…really LIKE this episode? I mean, I liked “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster.”

I enjoyed a lot of this episode and I groove on references as much as the next person. (There were a LOT of Twilight Zone references, even after we got past the cold open; that final scene could have been taken straight out of “To Serve Mankind” and just re-dubbed with different dialogue; I really enjoyed the whole “parallel universe” thing; and Reggie’s self-insert fic was pretty funny, though I agree that the best part of it was the self-insert opening credits with the LiteFM X-Files Theme.) And, you know, I generally like Darin Morgan’s episodes and I certainly hate much of what’s happened to this country in the last 20 years. So why did I not…in the end…really LIKE this episode? I mean, I liked “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster.”

I think there are a few contributing factors:

* Duchovny has said in some of the publicity around this episode that he thinks Darin Morgan really has it in for Mulder. I think Duchovny’s right about that, and that he always has. But in this episode, Morgan has it in for the whole show–or at least for the “special event” version of it. If there’s one overarching message emanating from this episode, it’s, “You know what, Chris, you really shouldn’t have done this.” Well, fine; but you’re getting paid, right?

* In my review of “This” I talked about the fact that Glen Morgan had finally brought the show alive into the 21st century. But the whole thrust of TLAOFS is that this is inadvisable if not impossible; and as a result, this episode doesn’t really try to bring the show to life. Much of its air time is spent on fauX-Files–reconstructions of things from Reggie’s POV, in which the tone is (again, deliberately) off and therefore nothing feels real. (Can I somehow unsee Mulder sitting on the couch with his 8yo body and 50yo head? Can Dr. They just get rid of that for me?) The rest of it is spent in conversation, and though some of those conversations are magical–Scully with her feet on the desk, Mulder with his giant board of conspiracy, Mulder yelling at the “punks,” Scully talking about how she wants to remember it all the way it was–some of them are just about Darin Morgan hammering the point home. Which brings me to:

* The social commentary. So, [@myassbrokethefall](https://tmblr.co/miugxZNg-q61amw_oEGdHiA) mentioned not liking the wedding cake and waterboarding gags. I didn’t like them either, and I’ve been thinking about why. I think it’s because somehow, the way they’re presented, the satire is drained of all the real, intense, painful emotions that normally power political satire. I mean, when I think of that time–the time of Abu Ghraib and Makr al Deeb, the time of George W. Bush’s fucking unconscionable and disastrous Iraq war and its never-ending stream of atrocities–I’m still angry. REALLY angry. If you think back to  _The Daily Show_  from that era, you will rememeber how much of the brilliant satire done by Stewart and Colbert et al. was fueled by rage and despair. There’s no rage and despair in that sequence. It’s just Morgan making his point. The point is made but it isn’t  **felt.** And that makes it less effective.

The same is true for the entire conversation with Dr. They. Yeah, I agree with all of that, which is why I don’t need to hear Dr. They rehash it unless you are going to  _convey something about it_  that I don’t already know or feel. The most interesting part of that scene, honestly, was the statues. The obligatory joke about the comments on the video was…obligatory, and not that well done. The one point at which that whole strain of it came alive for me was Mulder’s blowing up about how the world had become too crazy for even his conspiracy-tastic mind to make sense of it–again, because Mulder was actually  _feeling_ it. 

And then we get to the closing vignette with its reboot of “To Serve Mankind,” in which the aliens are building a wall around us. Yeah, I appreciate Morgan bringing it to The Buttercup. But…it is done baldly, and belabored. It’s basically a political cartoon. I guess I just never felt like Morgan really inhabited the critique, or really invested in it. What actually saves that scene is Duchovny investing in it–in an appropriately parodic way, kicking tantrum and all.

Maybe it was the direction, too–I don’t know. But mainly I feel as if the whole episode is Morgan’s self-insert, the way some of the episode is Reggie’s self-insert. As Darin Morgan’s farewell to the series, it’s interesting, and I guess he’s earned it. As an episode, I don’t think it really works.


	5. Manual Override: "RM9SBG93ZXJZ"

You know what, I enjoyed this episode more than “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.” And I think it actually works better both as a comic episode and as a meditation on the X-Files and nostalgia than that episode did. 

Yes, in some ways it feels like an episode of “Black Mirror.” But I think that’s kind of the point. This episode takes the original characters and puts them in the reboot universe, which hates them. On one level, the whole episode is just a joke about old people trying to use new technology. (I’m 48, don’t yell at me for calling people my age old.) It certainly aspires to other levels, though with uneven success. Ultimately, this episode doesn’t have a lot new to say about the fear of technology that has been part of science fiction from the beginning, and certainly part of the X-Files from its inception. But I appreciate the fact that they’ve found some fresh ways to say it.

All the buzz in advance was about how there’s almost no dialogue in this episode. This is, frankly, a gimmick, and I got kind of mad at it. It’s particularly awkward in the opening scene, where the longer you watch them, the more unrealistic it seems that they aren’t speaking to each other. I would buy them sitting silently side by side with their phones if it were crowded. But the two of them, alone, in that creepy restaurant? Without ONE snarky remark passing between them?

At any rate, one thing I appreciate about this episode is that it does look and feel fresh. The color palette is unlike anything I can remember from the original show, and instead of the trademark “shoot everything in the murky darkness” approach, they make brightly lit spaces super fucking creepy. It is true that I can’t imagine Scully voluntarily choosing to live in that SmartApartment; but maybe we can just pretend that she doesn’t spend very much time there because she’s always over at Mulder’s place and this was just something she found in a hurry and hangs on to just because she doesn’t want to commit to moving back in. Anyway, I’ll forgive them for the satanic Roomba and everything else just because of the running “personal massager” gag.

So, points for style. Also points for the little fan-shoutouts: Scully’s house password being “Queequeg” (which she has to spell for the drone on the phone), Mulder putting that sweet baseball swing to work (hips before hands!), the “Darkness Falls” references that I believe are there in the army of drones sequence at Mulder’s house, and so on. 

As far as what this episode teaches us…well, look, it’s not subtle. When I finally figured out that the reason the only song that ever plays in this episode is “Teach the Children Well” is that the moral of the story is that “we have to be better teachers”…that didn’t make this episode better for me. The arc of the plot, overall, is very simple and sends the message that every episode of “Black Mirror” sends: all this technology is isolating humans and driving us farther and farther apart. Mixed with this, incoherently, is the contradictory message that humans somehow have a responsibility to parent this new technology, which involves (and I guess this is not totally inconsistent with the experience of parenting) allowing these machines to extort money from you at gunpoint. So at the end of the day it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to just swear off all this tech forever (as Scully and Mulder do by going to the off-the-grid diner with human servers, paper tickets, and cash payment, where they finally hold hands) or spend our lives nurturing and caring for it. That’s because this episode just throws all 21st century tech into the same Bucket of Bad. You can see the problem in the cold open AI voice-over. I honestly thought this AI was going to show up as a character in the episode; but no, she was merely a cautionary tale about what a fetid cesspool of human evil Twitter has become. Social media plays no real role in the rest of the episode, during which the machines mostly talk to each other. I know that both social media and AI use learning algorithms; but one of these stories is about what’s wrong with human beings and one of them is about what’s wrong with automation. They’re not really the same story, though they are related. 

Years ago, GM aired a commercial at the Super Bowl that featured an anthropomorphized robot that got fired from its job for a quality control mistake. The robot was so depressed about being fired that it contemplated suicide–indeed, it actually jumped off a bridge, but then woke up, relieved that it was all a dream. This ad was supposed to be sort of edgy-funny, but in fact most viewers found it horrifying, for two reasons. Reason #1: humans were in fact being fired because of automation in factories like GM’s and they were in fact feeling despair over that. Reason #2: it’s really easy to get humans to treat something that vaguely moves and acts human as if it really is human, even when it’s not. And I guess this is my real beef with the whole tipping joke. Robot workers don’t need tips. What would they do with them? That money is just going to the human owners of the corporation. But Mulder’s supposed to feel bad for not tipping them, because by that point the robots have been successfully anthropomorphized. (Best part of that: the rescue drone flying in to airlift the broken drone to safety.) Meanwhile I’m sitting here on my own lawn yelling, “DON’T YOU TIP THAT FUCKING JOB THIEF!”

So, I’ve got issues with the ‘moral.’ But I also sort of love watching Mulder and Scully put down the phones and hold hands. Because. I see all the shit going around on tumblr making fun of old people who blame everything wrong with kids today on smartphones. And yeah, it can get stupid. But I remember life before smartphones and I now know life with them, and I will tell you, there is a difference. We have an need for physical touch and face to face interaction and not getting enough of it is bad for us. Over and over again in our little family we have to keep making ourselves turn off the computer, get away from the phone, play a game or read a book or go to the park or something. We know after a while it stops being good or even pleasant, but we keep not noticing when we’ve passed the point where it’s time to draw the line. This episode may not have a lot of answers. But the struggle is real.


	6. There's No Getting Out Of This Town Now: "Familiar"

In some of the other episode reviews I’ve done, I’ve been focused on the question of whether this show can really be brought alive into the twenty-first century. So far, it’s a mixed bag. I’d say the episodes most successful at getting the show to speak to our twenty-first century issues are “This,” in which we get to see our old friends trying to cope with the Trump administration’s assault on the FBI, and “Rm9sbG93ZXJz,” a flawed but overall enjoyable episode in which Mulder and Scully try the near future and don’t much like it. 

However, with the interestingly named “Familiar,” written by new guy Benjamin Van Allen, what we get is not so much an ‘updated’ version of the show, but a reminder of some of the things about this show that are timeless. Mulder and Scully, of course. But also: the misty and sinister forest at the edge of town, the idyllic American community with the dark secret, creepy yet vulnerable children, possessed dolls, witchcraft…and witch hunts.

Below the cut tag I’m going to talk about the whole witch hunt thing. Because it’s one area of American life where you can truly say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

The Salem witch trials of 1692 are a constant source of fascination for modern-day Americans. Partly because, I suppose, most of our founding narratives try to present the United States as a child of the Enlightenment–which is certainly how the Founding Fathers would have wanted us to see it–we can’t stop wondering how it was, or what it means, that real people were actually tried in the courts, sentenced, and executed as witches in the heart of New England. What fascinates us, I think, is the sense that  _something_  was definitely happening in Salem and the surrounding towns (Salem was where the courthouse was, not necessarily where all the ‘afflictions’ happened), but we’ll never really know what. Various theories have been proposed. The most recent book I’ve read about it is Mary Beth Norton’s  _In the Devil’s Snare_ , which I wholeheartedly recommend. 

One of the points Norton makes is that this was definitely not the only witchcraft scare that happened in New England at around that time. The Puritans were a highly strung group of people surrounded by a landscape of which they were terrified in which lurked people they considered to be Of The Devil. What’s unusual about Salem is the fact that it went so far, and that the courts participated in it so gleefully. Another unusual thing about it was that while it went on, ordinary social hierarchies seemed to have been suspended, with a group of adolescent and tween girls–normally a constituency that had very little clout and got very little respect or attention–suddenly given the authority to ruin the lives of adults, including men who would normally have a lot more power than they did. Norton’s thesis is that originally, many of the girls who reported all this witchcraft and affliction were experiencing PTSD from their exposure to violence during the First and Second Indian Wars. Their symptoms, and their descriptions of their nightmares, were then picked up by the adults and transformed into the massive collective delusion that led to 19 hangings (Giles Cory, let it never be forgotten, was pressed to death because he wouldn’t enter a plea). 

Arthur Miller muddied the waters significantly when he wrote  _The Crucible,_ which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the second Red Scare of the 1950s. (There was a first Red Scare in the late teens and early 1920s, right after the Bolshevik revolution.) Because of this play, generations of Americans have assumed that Communists were as scarce in Cold War America as witches are…well, everywhere. But in fact, there was an American Communist Party, it did have a significant footprint in Hollywood, and during the 1930s there was actually quite a bit of support for far-left parties in the US. What made the shared project of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator McCarthy a “witch hunt” was not that they were looking for something that didn’t exist. It was that they assumed that everyone who had ever given even a lingering glance in the direction of the Communist Party was a traitor being paid by the Soviet Union to help overthrow the American government. This paranoid belief was used to justify the wholesale persecution of the American left throughout the 1950s–McCarthy self-destructed around 52/53, but HUAC lasted out the decade–not only by subpoenaing, grilling, and jailing people, but by blacklisting them until they became unemployable. This particular witch hunt is one reason that the US still doesn’t really have a robust political left. But I digress.

Miller’s decision to use an illicit affair between John Proctor and the much younger Abigail (Miller makes her fifteen, but in real life she was younger) to motivate the accusations always seemed strangely gratuitous to me. But in the wake of #MeToo that seems less mysterious. The prospect of women in general, and young women in particular, suddenly having the power to call out and hold accountable the people who have mistreated them is terrifying for a lot of straight men, who fear that they will be next on the scaffold (falsely accused, of course!). In turning the story of the Salem witch panic into a story about one teenaged girl trying to blackmail and then destroy an older, more socially powerful man through the only means available to her, Miller both anticipated the confluence of forces that would lead to #MeToo, and sought to help stave off that day of reckoning by making the adult man into the martyr and the teenaged girl into a lying, unscrupulous, amoral, cruel manipulator who should never be trusted.

What has any of this to do with “Familiar,” you ask? Well, I’m interested in a number of things about the way the “witch hunt” plot is deployed in this episode. In a way, it’s a corrective to Miller’s version: the problem isn’t that they’re hunting something that doesn’t exist, but that they’re hunting everyone  _but_  the actual witch. But we also see Van Allen indulging in the kind of reflex defense of the hypothetical ‘innocent’ men who will hypothetically have their lives ruined because people are finally calling out sexual abuse and it will go TOO FAR. This is why Mulder, despite his defense of Scully in front of the cops, isn’t ever comfortable with her theory about the killer being a sexual predator. It’s also why Melvin Peter turns out to be not only innocent of the murders, but ‘innocent’ in a broader sense. One could be forgiven for not catching this in the midst of the melee, but what Peter is saying while he’s being beaten up is “I never hurt anyone, it was statutory.” The implication is that he got convicted for having sex with someone who was not a child, but was below the legal age of consent (which varies, but is usually somewhere in the high teens). In the BBC mystery show  _Broadchurch_ , there’s a very similar ‘witch hunt’ subplot involving exactly the same kind of sex offender: a man who has been a pillar of the community for years, but is a registered sex offender because his now-dead wife was much younger than he was, and they got together when she was, I think, seventeen. In both cases, I think, what you see is a male writer protesting against all this calling-out of male misbehavior out of fear that He Might Be Next, and camouflaging this self-interested justification of male sexual misconduct by presenting it as a defense of the rights of the individual against the irrational anger of a sex-panic-driven mob.

As frustrated as I am by all that, I have to give Van Allen credit for making this witch hunt as legitimately terrifying as the familiar’s various guises are legitimately creepy. After Officer Wentworth has heroically risked his life to protect Eggers, and Mulder and Scully have apparently restored order, Eggers’s swift and sudden execution of Peter is genuinely shocking. Though there’s no direct referencing of Black Lives Matter, Wentworth’s decision to cooperate with Mulder and Scully is inspired by his moral revulsion at Eggers’s cold-blooded shooting of a suspect who clearly posed no threat–a violation of “due process” which has been lethally inflicted on people of color by cops all over this country. The utter creepiness of Mr. Chuckleteeth and the demon Teletubbies is a good execution of a classic horror trope, but it also evokes parental anxieties about YouTube, which has become infested with videos in which horrifying and twisted things happen to characters from children’s shows. 

So all of this stuff is still with us. Which makes it interesting, if depressing, to note that Scully and Mulder are no more effective at combating witchcraft now than they were back in the early seasons in “Die Hand Die Verletzt.” Though Scully and Mulder DO solve cases (lest we forget), the witchcraft plots tend to end inconclusively, with the suspects out of reach and Mulder and Scully unable to prevent any of these magic-inflicted deaths. The death toll in “Familiar” is shockingly high, and includes (unusually) two young children. Like the witch hunt, the actual witchcraft is getting more destructive and demanding greater sacrifices. The powers of darkness, since the 1990s, have apparently only grown. 

And so, in one of my favorite moments in this episode, Mulder responds to Scully’s resigned, “Let’s get out of this town” with “There’s no getting out of this town now.” The madness that led Anna to unleash the Familiar, like the madness that led to the unjustifiable death of Melvin Peter, are no longer confined to little towns in New England; they’ve engulfed the entire country. Throughout this episode, Mulder seems to be experiencing a kind of existential dread. He doesn’t approach the paranormal side of the case with the buoyant zest of his youth. Dark magic is no longer rare; the occult is no longer secret. The monsters have not only shown up on Maple Street but taken the joint over. The Lottery’s not just once a year any more. There’s a trash monster in the White House. There’s no getting out of this town. It’s where we’re all living. And maybe it’s where we’ve always been living, ever since 1692.


	7. It Beats The Alternative: S11 e09, "Nothing Lasts Forever"

You know why people have all their romantic dinners by candlelight? Because it makes everybody look good. It softens shadows, conceals details, and bathes everything in and around it in an amber radiance that we somehow find irresistible. And that’s lucky, because it means that most of the scenes Mulder and Scully share in this episode are beautiful. We can always count on Chris Carter, who’ll be helming the final episode, to, as he says, put a dimmer on it. But for right now, Mulder and Scully are glowing, safe inside their own private grotto, lighting their unity candle at the closest thing to an altar that Mulder is ever going to be willing to approach.

We’d all like to detach those scenes from the actual X-File here, which is surely one of the goriest and grossest they’ve ever done. And yet, thematically, it’s hard to do that, given that the entire episode is about how to deal with aging and the passage of time. So I’m going to talk about the whole enchilada, below. Don’t worry, I’m not going to use any images. Fair warning, though: I may go on just a *teensy* bit of a rant about Catholicism and the X-Files.

Karen Nielsen is one of the new writers they hired after Gillian Anderson let it be known that she had a problem with the fact that in 2018 the writers’ room was still all-male. That has indeed been a major problem for this show since its inception. In the first nine seasons, there were a total of six episodes written entirely or partially by women, including “[All Things](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F2097909&t=NmZkYzc1MWJlYWU5OWJmYWZlNzZmZmMzN2IwMTVkNzE1MTE0M2Q5YyxJOFdzTkFwWg%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=http%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F171904299669%2Fit-beats-the-alternative-x-files-nothing-lasts&m=1),” which was written by Gillian Anderson. All of these episodes were monster-of-the-weeks and, except for “All Things” (which establishes that Scully and Mulder are sleeping together), none of them had any connection to the mythology arc.

It’s interesting to me, for this reason, that the X-File of “Nothing Lasts Forever” is reminiscent of one of those few female-written episodes: the season 4 episode “Sanguinarium,” by Vivian and Valerie Mayhew. Set mostly in a plastic surgery clinic, it’s also about doctors performing unholy operations in the context of black magic and the search for eternal youth; and it also was one of the goriest episodes ever filmed. (IMDB tells me that by the time they shot it, the script had been heavily doctored by the inner circle of male writers, so who knows what it originally was supposed to be like.) But perhaps I’m making too much of a coincidence; after all, nearly everything in “Nothing Lasts Forever” has been dealt with in an earlier episode: cannibalism (“Red Museum”), cults (“The Field Where I Died”), black market organ harvesting (“Hell Money”), killers with a thing for Catholic iconography and Catholic churches (“Milagro”), and so on. What you might call the parasitic rejuvenation trope–a story in which one being achieves eternal youth and beauty by preying on humans–pops up all over the place. As for medical horror, the X-Files is replete with it, whether of the garden variety on view in “Sanguinarium” and “Unruhe,” or the special alien-conspiracy-inflected version that shows up in too many mythology episodes to count. Everyone on the X-Files has had their body invaded at least once by conspiracy doctors using sinister medical technology–Scully first and foremost, but it also happens to Mulder ( “Tunguska/ Terma”, “Amor Fati” / “The Sixth Extinction”), Kovarrubias ( _Fight the Future_ , I think) and even Skinner (the one with the killer nanites). Hell, even Krychek got his arm taken off with a hot knife at one point.

Unfortunately, I hate medical horror. I hated it when the X-Files was new; I hate it even more now that it evokes my memories of being wheeled off for surgery (which, despite the calming drugs they said they’d given me, remains the single most terrifying experience of my life). So this episode was hard for me to watch. The cult is, of course, intended as a metaphor for what’s going on with The X-Files itself; though the Barbara Beaumont Show’s hiatus has been a lot longer, she’s clearly preparing for a comeback, a la Norma Desmond–and determined to make sure that SHE stars in the reboot. The most interesting part of all that, to me, was Barbara’s interaction with Scully when she and Mulder first show up. Nielsen is presumably aware of the generalized amazement on the Interwebs regarding the flowering of Gillian Anderson’s mid-life beauty. Indeed, I have seen many people rhetorically asking how she does it and whether witchcraft is involved. Personally, I think it’s probably HRT. [Hormone replacement therapy](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fforbesbooksauthors%2F2017%2F04%2F16%2Fthe-long-and-misunderstood-history-of-hormone-replacement-therapy%2F%23756241a2667c&t=ODYyZjYyNTY3OTg1OWIxZmRjYjg5MjI0MjQwZjIxY2RlNjEyZmVhOSxJOFdzTkFwWg%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=http%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F171904299669%2Fit-beats-the-alternative-x-files-nothing-lasts&m=1) has been available for menopausal women since the 1980s and 1990s, and although there was a scare in 2002 when a study found that one popular HRT drug significantly increased the risk of breast cancer, workarounds have since been devised. HRT is supposed to reduce the symptoms of menopause–hot flashes, insomnia, the ever-popular “irritability,” and so on. One of the symptoms of menopause is aging. It’s the loss of estrogen, after our ovaries shut down, that makes us start to look old (and to suffer less visible physiological changes that make sex less enjoyable, but let me try not to go too TMI here). Anyway, I think that’s the reason why in the 2000s in Hollywood 40 was suddenly the new 30 and everyone was marveling at how hot and young-looking all these middle-aged actresses were somehow managing to stay. At any rate, Barbara’s critical but intrigued appraisal of Scully’s face– “It’s not too late”–is a nifty little meta joke and it also emphasizes that coming back for seasons 10 and 11 required a certain amount of courage on Anderson’s part, since it would mean she would be subjected to this kind of scrutiny by millions of viewers every week.

Scully looks a lot better at her age than I look at my very similar age, and I take my hat off to Gillian Anderson for that. But why did I just type that? Why this demand that, after our childbearing years are over, we go on trying to fit standards for feminine beauty that were never realistic to begin with? What is so terrifying to Tinseltown about a woman who looks and feels her age? Why have we never been considered worth watching? Don’t answer that; I know why. I know. Still. At least in “Nothing Lasts Forever,” most of the actual jokes about aging are directed at Mulder and his “progressive lenses,” though I will note that this also is a familiar and nonthreatening way to do that (there’s an extended bifocals joke for Kirk in  _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_ , for instance, which features a William Shatner who is definitely no longer young and pretty), and the final confrontation involves, not Barbara vs. Scully, but Mulder facing off against a middle-aged man with a pallid and listless younger woman surgically attached to his back–which may be the downright nastiest metaphor for a May-December relationship that a TV show has ever offered me. 

So, OK, this trope is not new; in addition to  _Sunset Boulevard_  (still one of my favorite movies of all time) Barbara Beaumont’s character seems to me heavily indebted to Goldie Hahn’s character in the 1992 film  _[Death Becomes Her](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0104070%2F%3Fref_%3Dfn_al_tt_1&t=YWY3MzNiYTY3NTBjZDBkNTRhMDJkM2M5NzNhZDM3Mzk0Mzk2MTkzMyxJOFdzTkFwWg%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=http%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F171904299669%2Fit-beats-the-alternative-x-files-nothing-lasts&m=1), _ in which she and Meryl Streep play aging actresses who join a mysterious community of immortal film stars dependent on a serum concocted by a supernatural beauty played by Isabella Rossellini. My issue with this trope is that though it always pretends to be satirizing and critiquing the absurd demands that the entertainment industry makes of women, it almost always winds up becoming a misogynistic takedown of the actresses themselves, who are portrayed as monsters of vanity willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to preserve their beauty. Certainly that’s what happens in this episode, where Barbara is not only a ruthless narcissist who will happily consume the bodies of her followers in order to preserve her not-all-that-remarkable beauty and spends most of her waking hours watching repeats of her not-that-funny sitcom, but the demonic priestess of a cult whose rituals are persistently and quite explicitly analogized to the Catholic mass. The visual links are very clear; there’s a cut from Scully receiving the eucharist to Olivia passing around the ‘dinny’ to the cult members, and another cut from Scully extending her hands to the priest to Barbara giving Olivia stigmata with a knife so she can drink the blood. They include enough of the liturgy of the Eucharist (I haven’t been to a Catholic mass since they changed the words, so I don’t know how accurate it was) to impress on everyone a facile analogy between the eucharist and cannibalism which has historically been made in anti-Catholic propaganda. 

And this is where the rant comes in. I will make it short: Catholicism has been mined by the horror genre since even before  _Dracula_ fetishized all the ‘idolatrous’ and ‘superstitious’ Catholic practices that sensible English Protestants were supposed to have outgrown. (It’s not just holy water and the sign of the cross. Van Helsing carries consecrated wafers around with him everywhere and at one point actually makes a caulking sealant out of putty and crushed-up communion wafers so he can block up Lucy’s mausoleum.) Whenever you see Catholicism show up in the context of horror, it’s always anachronistic, Gothic, and exoticized; it’s not so much a modern religion that people actually practice as an ancient ritual cult whose esoteric wisdom has somehow survived into modernity. On the X-Files, all Catholic churches are Gothic, all church windows are stained glass, priests are always in full clerical garb, confession still happens through a grille, and all Catholics fill their homes with pictures of the saints and statues of the Virgin Mary. Though this isn’t their first episode with a Catholicism-crazed killer–that honor probably goes to “Milagro”–this is definitely the most intimate relationship this show’s ever created between Catholicism and horror. 

It’s perhaps to make up for this that Nielsen stages all of the good things that happen between Mulder and Scully in this episode in the same church. Their final conversation is moving, long-awaited, and really quite beautiful; and although I am no longer Catholic myself–I didn’t lapse; I ran–I can still appreciate the symbolism of their lighting candles together instead of (as Mulder says during their first real conversation in  _I Want to Believe_ ) cursing the darkness. As they say, aging sucks but it beats the alternative; by extending this show’s life, artificially though that may be, season 11 at least allows this show and Mulder and Scully to go out in a fiery blaze of September glory instead of rotting amongst the fallen leaves of November as it did in  _I Want To Believe_. But I can’t ever quite put away how much this show seems to be in love with the darkest aspects of Catholicism–especially with regard to Chris Carter’s retrograde ideas about sexuality, reproduction, and the female body. I very much fear that in “My Struggle IV,” that candle will go out, one way or another. But for now, we can all kind of warm our hands over it, grateful for one of the rare moments at which this show has allowed Mulder and Scully, and us, to linger in the light.


End file.
